Man Who Trademarked “Lower East Side” Priced Out of Neighborhood

Local designer Robert Lopez trademarked the term “Lower East Side” in 2007. He has since sued retailers—including J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and Macy’s—who he claimed infringed upon the trademark. But on May 31, he had to close shop. Lopez told DNA Info that his landlord had raised the rent by $2,000, a cost his business could not absorb.

Trademarking a name in the mid-aughts doesn’t make one a canonical resident of a neighborhood born out of James De Lancey’s pre-revolutionary estate, but Lopez grew up in the neighborhood’s sprawling public-housing development, LaGuardia Houses. He runs a small business. The pricing-out of people like Lopez is a story familiar to any gentrifying city in America, and it’s one that has repeated itself over and over in Manhattan’s L.E.S.

Pink Pony, a beloved café first opened in the early 90s on Ludlow Street alongside rock bar and gallery space Max Fish, shuttered in February of 2013 when its landlord reportedly asked for 42 percent increase in rent. Less than six months later, Max Fish—a haunt where Johnny Depp, Moby, Elliot Smith, Ethan Hawkedrank alongside students and other non-stars—also closed.

Even newer, high-end establishments—themselves emblematic of earlier waves of gentrification—are being forced out of the neighborhood as developers look to erect more and more condominium buildings. WD-50, a restaurant where a $155 tasting menu can be enjoyed with a $95 wine pairing, announced on Tuesday that it would serve its last patrons at the end of November. Quoting Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” Chef Wylie Dufresne told The New York Times that he has yet to decide where he’ll go next: “It’s like they say, ‘You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.’”

Lopez, for his part, he hopes to find a new retail space in the L.E.S. For now, he has moved products into his Grand Street office and showroom.

As I’ve written before, editorial hand wringing over gentrification is a bit uncomfortable, as many of those who oppose gentrification on principle are in effect gentrifiers themselves, and many more benefit by living in neighborhoods that were gentrified before their arrival. But that gentrification seems to be unstoppable in cities with skyrocketing rent doesn’t make it any less sad when longtime neighborhood fixtures are erased by more and more condos and chain coffee shops.

In any case, what’s most baffling about the gentrification of the Lower East Side is that the city seems unwilling and/or incapable of finishing the endless construction on the corner of Houston and Allen. Beware, new resident: you can live in a nice condo and buy a five-dollar cappuccino, but you will sit in snarled traffic every time you try to leave or return to your neighborhood. Think of Lopez while you’re waiting 15 minutes to traverse the few blocks between the Whole Foods and Il Laboratorio del Gelato.